Russians Financed The U.S. Anti-Fracking Movement: Oil Tycoon

Russians financed the anti-fracking movement in the United States, an American oil tycoon alleged today during the Forbes Reinventing America Summit in Chicago.

"Russia's spent a great deal of money over here to cause a panic in the United States over fracking to stop it, because suddenly their market share is going away,"
Continental Resources Chairman and CEO Harold Hamm said during an on-stage interview with Christopher Helman, the southwest bureau chief for Forbes Media.

"There was a lot of money spent in the U.S. to send people into a panic over fracking because they wanted to stop what we were doing. They saw this coming,"

Hamm's comments bring to American soil an allegation made last year by NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who charged that Russians were funding anti-fracking movements in Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Like Hamm, Rasmussen offered no smoking gun, though Foreign Policy magazine found some credibility in the charge: "Well-organized and well-funded environmental opposition to fracking in Europe sprang up suddenly in countries such as Bulgaria and Ukraine, which had shown little prior concern for the environment but which are heavily dependent on Russia for energy supplies. Similar movements have also targeted Europe’s plans to build pipelines that would offer an alternative to reliance on Moscow."

Hamm pioneered development of the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota, using horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to extract oil from deep shale deposits. Oil production in the Bakken has boomed from less than 200,000 barrels a day in 2007 to more than 1.3 million this year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency.

So dramatic has been the impact of resources like the Bakken in the international market that the Heritage Foundation's chief economist recommended Hamm for the Nobel Peace Prize, in part for weakening Russia's stronghold on European energy supplies.

Hamm brought up the Russians after Helman asked him to clarify the difference between horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

"It's horizontal drilling" that's new, Hamm said. "Fracking's been around for 60 years. 1947 was the first time Erle P. Halliburton fracked a well in Oklahoma."

Fracking is "a method to open up the natural fractures in the formation to where they will produce," Hamm said, while horizontal drilling allows wells to extend 3 miles sideways into the earth.

Nonetheless, and perhaps with the aid of the Russians, it's the fracking label that sticks. Forbes has called Hamm a "fracking pioneer" and "fracking king" (See Helman's profile of Hamm here), and both ABC and NBC called him a "fracking tycoon" earlier this year when he wrote a $975 million check to settle a divorce.

I've covered the energy and environment beat since 1985, when I discovered my college was discarding radioactive waste in a dumpster. That story ran in the Arizona Republic, and I have chased electrons and pollutants ever since, for dailies in Arizona and California, for alt...